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Microsoft's "Mojave Experiment" Teaser Site Goes Live
MojoKid writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft was reported to be arranging a kind of 'blind taste test' to get die-hard Windows XP users to try Vista. They were told that they were trying a new OS, called Mojave. The report went on to suggest that users liked the OS, though they were actually running Vista. Now it appears Microsoft has put up a
teaser site, with
plans to show the actual video footage next week. Though the footage should at least have some entertainment
value, it would be a bit of a reach to expect that the test methodologies were
real-world enough such that users had to deal with things like user account
control, driver updates, and broad application compatibility."
Researchers have conducting 'taste tests' have found that recipients of grits in their pants preferred having cold grits poured down their pants rather than hot grits.
makes you wonder if they used a stock install of vista, or the upcoming vista sp1 etc. 'here, it's not a pile of crap'
(with each driver being run having been fully audited by microsoft, and everything tested beforehand to make sure it works)
A good test would have been to have them install the os themselves, on a box that could be randomly chosen from a large selection each with different hardware, and to see how well they fare with getting it all going.
They were probably running on top of the range hardware as well, a grahics card with 1GB of RAM, system with 4GB of RAM and a Quad core processor etc.. most people accept that Vista looks nicer, but looks are not everything to those who have to use their computer every day for work.
Would have been funny if they tried to do this when Vista was first released and one of the tests was 'delete a file' :p
which is totally what she said
The only problem with Vista is that it requires a decent machine and a dedicated video card.
BTW I am running Fedora 9 while typing this post.
You see all it requires is for users to be re-educated and they will love Vista. The same way that if only goverments could re-educate the voters they'd have nothing to gripe about.
Why didn't they give the users multiple flavors of the most colorful operating systems they never tried (Vista, OSX, Kubuntu, etc) and ask them which one they liked best?
They gave them Vista and asked them if they liked it... That doesn't say much because nobody (most importantly THEY) knows if they'd like OSX more.
I think this is a bad move by Microsoft. It only makes them seem desperate. By making this viral campaign, they openly admit that vista so far has failed in the consumer market.
This campaign really focus on the wrong issues. The main complaints over vista has never been that it isn't shiny and dazzling enough. The problems was that it makes older hardware painfully slow, the UAC annoyance, incompatible drivers etc. These are not things that a user notices in a 10 minute demo. This campaign shows nothing.
75% of the whiners haven't ever installed it, and the other 25% tried to put it on a 6 year old budget "Dude I got Dell" computer the first month after it went public.
I don't even think there is even a dead horse anymore to beat. You guys are just masterbating now.
So... it just finished booting up?
Build a tool even an idiot can use and only an idiot will want to use it. -S.O.B.
It seems to me that this was NOT users testing a system, but instead was a (10 minute) demo shown to users. So it wouldn't mean anything. All demos always look good (or someone needs to be fired quickly).
Or did I misunderstand it?
Roseanne Roseannadanna: The violence in our cities must stop! Innocent people are traveling around on the Intertubes and finding themselves assaulted by violent corporations. Now they are using electrical gun-things to shock ordinary citizens when they innocently go to certain places.
Chevy Chase: Uh, Roseanne, that's a teaser site, not a taser site.
Roseanne Roseannadanna: Oh. Never mind.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
...to sell you real cheap.
Yeah, maybe they did run Vista - on an overclocked Bloomfield with 4GB RAM and 15000 RMP RAID0 drives. Plus they secretly tweaked Vista "just a little bit", nothing "relevant enough to disclose" in the article.
Or maybe they just flat out, you know, DIDN'T run Vista at all there. Is that a much bigger lie than bribing ISO members (or bribing non-members to become members and then...) to vote in favour of OOXML, and then say that OOXML won on its own merit?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Microsoft may got something here.
I don't think Vista's requirements are a problem at all for people with at least a 2 year old pc.
Vista's main problem is marketing related. They didn't stick with only one household version (ultimate) like OS X does, instead they offer you 10 versions like "starter, home basic, home premium" and people gets irritated and confused.
This Mohave thing looks like a facelift making the product less microsoftish and more Web 2.0/Apple inclined.
It may work with people who got seducted with a Macbook if they cash in good press, enough ads and TV spots.
So, microsoft disguised vista as a good operating system... why don't they do that for EVERYONE?
I cant say this really suprised me. Seems like people foam at the mouth if you start talking about vista just because its from microsoft.
I work with a guy who really prides himself as being an tech god. We were looking at laptops because we both needed one, and of course all of them had vista. I was treated to him bitching how he couldnt find one without it. I asked why he didnt like it and he simply said it was because of all the problems people were having. I asked if it was the fluffy interface or the driver problems or even just the new-ish interface. He simply grunted it was because of all of it and said he never actulay tried it yet. I later learned he hasnt even had the chance to sit down and watch someone use it 0_o I think a huge chunk of people are like this, and it makes me die inside a little every time I hear it.
If your someone who isnt really a big geek I can understand the attitude. Of couse if your a IT person and your too lazy or retarded to simply find a fix for it and go on with your life, you should just grow up.
That being said, I use XP and I intend to as long as I can. If I have to change I will, and I wont be bitching the whole way down that road.
This smacks of some desperation on Microsoft's part. I mean, if they have to avoid telling people they're using Vista, then they're acknowledging there's a negative perception of the OS out there.
And this, IMHO, is what trips software makers up. If your product is perceived negatively, then you'd damn well better find out why and fix it. I've said this about OpenOffice for a while now. Is it slow? Maybe a little. Not terrible to me, but maybe a little, and there are certainly some people who think so. So try and work on that. The same goes for Vista. For better or worse, people don't like it, so find out why and address those issues. Don't just try to convince people that their opinions are wrong.
The problem, of course, is that MS has invested tons of money in Vista. Whether it's a turkey or not, it's perceived that way, and MS realizes it, hence this site. But when people have made up their minds, it won't be easy to solve the problem simply by telling them they're wrong. Address their complaints instead, and you might convince them.
Having a hands-off experience with an OS is like examining a car in the showroom: its mileage is just great as long as you don't start the engine.
In addition, my guess is that that Microsoft ensured favourable test conditions (top-of-the-line hardware, plenty of Ram, hardware graphics acceleration, and a nice clean install without crapware).
This "Mojave" demonstration might be good publicity though, but only as long as people don't start to question what exactly was shown and whether or not Microsoft provided unrealistically favourable test conditions. For one thing seems pretty obvious: Microsoft didn't use a $498 Dell computer from Wallmart as a test platform.
This is the question which bothers me when reading about the "mojave experiment", how can it be that those ppl. haven't seen anything of vista and so could not recognize it on sight ?
/.readers did - when it was a beta, a thanks to independent software distributors.
I know how Vista would look - as 90% of
So what have they changed, that those "experienced users" haven't recognized it as vista, or were they drugged before or even bribed ?
Was it really Vista or was it Windows Server 2008, which seems to be the better Vista ?
I think of this as a usual MS market scam, but it reminds me to a similar kind of annoying advertisement IBM was persuing
for OS/2 Warp 3.0.
It was on german TV, don't know if it was somewhere else on TV, featuring a small headed blondi-like secretary who was just to dumb to understand how real multitasking would make her work easier, and how OS/2 would push her climax to a new orgasm*)
By the way if it wouldn't be possible to turn off all colourfullness on WindowsXP I wouldn't use it either and
stayed with Windows 2000, or I would have poisoned the search dog, burned the wizzard and clamped the paper clip.
*Warning this is a pleonasm.
I tried windows Vista, initially I didn't really hate it. The improved I/O scheduling for instance was quite noticeable and nice. However after a while the non accelerated GDI graphics of older applications really started to piss me of. Eventually I switched back to XP, because I just couldn't stand the slow redrawing of Visual Studio and Photoshop anymore. Mind you, this was on a Pentium 4 2.533 GHz, perhaps it's not as horrible on a faster machine.
Just about any OS is nice and fun to use for the first few hours of use.
Watch how aggravated people become when trying to use "Mojave" in the real world.
After the first few days they'll be annoyed, after the first few weeks they'll be pissed off and aggravated.
After a few months they'll want to swap back to XP/Linux etc
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I run both XP64 and Ubuntu 8.04 on identical hardware side by side (test lab) with a happy absence of problems on either, and the Server 2003 SP hs worked just fine on XP. Microsoft can build something that is solid and just works. So why don't they? (needs a naivete tag here). I would happily run either OS on my notebook but driver support is the problem in both cases. Why didn't Microsoft make the 64 bit switch when they could have done (I know, because the original Intel dual core couldn't run it...but that was years ago.)
The only thing wrong with MS 64 bit is that stupid name change to "Program Files (X86)" complete with vacuous spaces and brackets which should never appear in file names. Why didn't they leave it alone for back compatibility and just put all the 64 bit code in a folder called "Programs"? Time to stop, Kupfernigk, it's hot and you're rambling.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Microsoft's attempts to pull their Edsel out of the mud reminds me of a line from an old Albert Brooks movie:
"Wouldn't it be great if desperation made us more attractive?"
You are welcome on my lawn.
Or maybe they did run Vista on the hardware they stated, and you're just another anti-Vista fud-spreader bouncing around in the Slashdot echo chamber?
You remember the coke ads where the "randomly selected" participants invariably chose coke over the other brand? No, really? What did you think you see, a "representative average"? Or just the ones that actually chose coke, no matter whether that was 90 or 10 percent of the people "tested"?
It's like those "interviews" where they try to show just how dumb the average Joe is. Go out on the street with a world map and let people point out Iraq. Sure, 90% might find it, but when you only show the 10% who search for ages and finally point to India or even Florida, you "show" just how dumb the population is.
But let's for a moment assume that yes, 90 percent of their participants said that Vista is nice. Ok, it is. Hey, it sure looks great. Especially when you offer nothing to compare it to. Give someone who's hungry a Hamburger and he'll tell you it's great. Especially when you don't offer him some steak at the same time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
M$'s mojave's site is running on Apache/Cent OS :/
How ironic
My (limited) Vista experience is on a laptop with Celeron CPU, 1Gb RAM and Intel graphics.
It seemed to run just fine to me, Aero included.
I wounldn't have Vista for other reasons but maybe Microsoft is right - people like you need to take a second look.
No sig today...
The right way to conduct such a test would be to pull a random low-end, Vista-certified PC from the shelf at Wal-Mart or Best Buy and then see what happens, starting with the unboxing process.
One of the many ways in which Microsoft aimed a BFG9000 at its own feet was certifying hardware incapable of running Vista. Hundreds of thousands of laptops were shipped with 512MB of memory. "First run" on such a system can take up to 45 minutes as Vista actually has to install itself first. Then the machine is so crippled by lack of RAM that even running Solitaire is interrupted by wild disk activity accompanied by random lockups of the user interface.
If you want to run Vista, you need to spend the price of an Macintosh on the hardware. And if you're going to do that, you might as well get a Mac in the first place.
There's nothing wrong with those half-gig laptops, by the way. They're great when running Ubuntu.
However, I don't feel the need to go through a huge upheaval: replacing pretty much every component of my machine and learning a different set of "stuff" just to run the same old applications that I use daily.
The machine I have runs very nicely with XP on 512MB and a modest 1.2GHz processor. I've been running it like this for years with no complaints, problems or compatability issues and until a new, killer app. comes along that only runs on Vista then I plan stick with this for the next several years. When I do get to the point of upgrading, I plan to keep this setup in a virtual environment, probably with a Linux host.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Apparently there was a slight error in the experiment. It was found that Windows XP was actually installed on the machines, not Vista.
I chose to tag this 'itwasatrap'
(;
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur. . . . . . . .
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
At first I thought that publicity stunts like this are more the kind of thing that Apple would do (Mac vs PC videos), and then I thought that is exactly what Microsoft is doing: They're not only trying to emulate Apple in the OS and mp3 player space, now they're also trying to emulate Apple's marketing.
Thing is, stuff like this doesn't really work without a strong brand, and while Microsoft itself is a strong brand, Vista absolutely isn't.
No, what this really says to me is: Pure desperation. Microsoft have dug itself into such a hole with the mess that is Vista, and the Vista brand is by now so bad that even non-techs no longer want it, that they have to rely on hiding the brand to try and fix it.
"Hey, which cola did you like more, A or B?"
"I liked A. Was it Coke?"
"Both were Coke."
"So, what's making them different?"
"I dipped my balls in sample A."
"What?"
"I dipped my balls in it. You like the taste of my balls."
Windows Vista, we dipped our balls in it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The fact that 90% of the respondants went along with saying that a beta was really cool is nothing new. Have fancy new features and it's in the bag.
But for the study...
These people had their expectations lowered by being told it was a BETA...
So this is just a study showing that vista is a nice as an operating system in beta.
For a proper release product however... I think market has shown that it really, *REALLY* isn't at that stage.
OK, poor call by Microsoft. Seems like a pretty pants way of recovering from a bad situation... but surely there is some logic to trying to avert Vista prejudice. I have not used Vista extensively... I switched to Linux in the Windows XP era and haven't looked back... but I have to admit that I have become afflicted by Vista prejudice promoted by the tech community. Have I properly trialled Vista before reaching my conclusion of it being the spawn of Hell? No. Have the majority of Vista-haters out there? I wonder. So yes, I can see why this would seem like a viable test, although they needed to keep it a closed one, and then work on the findings.
if you are down to running margarine commercial like tests to make the public accept vista, its time to let it go.
work on your next version, windows 7, dont load it full of drm shit just because a few dinosaurs in big media asked you, make it modular, and you will sell.
but, i really dont think that you will be able to resist the pressure from RIAA, MPAA and other shit.
Read radical news here
It's like Vista, but without all the stability issues and overall powerhog attitude that you can expect from it.
The first day of this OS has been more stable than Vista ever was and i even think more apps worked on Windows 7 than on Vista directly after install without issues, but i won't go as far to compare it with XP. It hasn't reached that point of OS maturity.
...in the way they broke Media Player (and maybe most dialog boxes). With XP, and who knows how many OS versions before that, you go alt-F, O and you are looking at your files. Then you go shift-tab and you are IN your files. Well, with Vista you are never in your files (via the keyboard). You will end up in a lot of strange places, but never will you highlight a file. Since I rely on this constantly in XP, this single problem is enough of a FU to make me not want to use Vista ever.
This brings to mind a similarly sucky breakage. Windows 95's sound recorder v1.0 would not respond to the keyboard until you clicked somewhere on the menus, then all would be normal. They quietly fixed this at some later date but the point was made: "We don't want people to be too productive, or they won't want to upgrade, so let's insert random WTFs throughout the OS, to be fixed (or not) in the future once we add new WTFs to replace them." aka the upgrade treadmill.
I come here for the love
I have a lot of difficulty matching my Vista experience with the meme. People seem remarkably enthusiastic to dismiss the OS and complain about lack of compatibility and sluggishness in particular. My impression was going 64 bit bordered on masochism.
Having started out on SP1 with common, modern hardware, I have none of these apparently certain problems - indeed the reverse has held true. Vista boots noticeably faster and is much more snappy in use. All of my hardware had Vista drivers. I can't see why MS bothered with the 32bit version since 64 happily runs everything I've thrown at it. UAC was a nuisance for the first week but experienced users can revert to a proper account management and novices can get some of it's security from UAC.
I can see why businesses are sticking with XP. There isn't justification to risk any headaches. There's not enough value for home users with XP already on their machines. Advanced users may have specific reason to avoid it even on new machines.
It's fully justified to critisise MS for releasing a product that fails to push us substantially further forward than the 5 years+ since XP. But for Joe home user buying a new PC, I think the tech enthusiast community are doing them a disservice with our Vista vitriol. We encourage them to decide between Vista or XP, and to pick the weaker of the two. The choice should be Vista or Linux.
I have this collection of tech and mainstream press opinion of Vista as well as the more comprehensive the Vista Failure Log which details industry rejection. PC Magazine, PC World, the Atlantic Monthly, the Independent, EWeek, ITWeek, Dvorak, CNet and Network World all agreed with 90% of IT managers in thinking that Vista should be avoided. ExtremeTech wrote Vista's obituary in 2008. This was followed by USA Today and Time, which called Microsoft an "empire in rapid decline". I collected all the links, just for you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I had been toying around with Linux for a few months, in the days of Fedora Core 4, seeing if this whole Linux thing was worth my time. I had never used Linux before, and found it lacking support for various things, such as my wireless card. So I went back to XP x64. Vista changed all that. Suddenly, my computer went from pretty fast to pretty darn slow. Removing needless services, slimming everything down, and other optimization didn't do the trick. UAC is annoying, even when turned off; I don't want it to constantly remind me it is turned off. Linux on the same hardware was much faster, and I tried other distros and got everything I wanted working. Openoffice, though not my preference, was workable and I used it for college. I got all the eyecandy that Vista was supposed to bring but with an increase in the speed and usability. Now I'm even considering putting Ubuntu or Mandriva or some other easily Linux distro on my grandma's old computer. She has had serious mental problems due to the barbaric practice of electroshock therapy. If she can figure it out, I'm sure all the other techonophobes can.
SSC
What an appropriate designation for a Vista test.
Microsoft should sign up to the OpenCL initiative, this would allow them to tap the unused resources in the graphics card and give Vista a chance of performing adequately on average machines.
I guess the NIH syndrome will remain in place though
I don't get it.
Are they going to use this info to fire the people who named their OS "Vista", arguing that they should have named it "Mojave" instead?
Or are they going to publicly suggest that people like me, who think Vista is a pile of crap (and say so), are so stupid that we would change our tunes if they just renamed the OS - none of us would notice and suddenly we would claim "Mojave" was great? Because we're just that clueless?
Seriously - are they trying to _prove_ that the world has a negative perception of MS and Vista? Is that really a great idea?
Actually, you have to distinguish between
1. what MS's PR/propaganda machine does to the outside world, and
2. what MS does internally.
I remember the story linked to on Slashdot, where basically to get any new product and technology done at MS, you had to go in front of Bill Gates, hear him say that it's the dumbest thing he ever heard, then tell him that he's wrong and you're sure of it. Pretty much everything that was done at MS past some point, was done by people who told Bill Gates to his face that he's wrong or made a mistake.
It's not Apple, where everything is supposedly done because of The Great Man Steve Jobs, and everything is because of The Great Man's vision, and He is never wrong. At MS everything was done _in_ _spite_ of Bill Gates's vision to the contrary. Or at least so went that little game internally.
Their invasion of the Internet, going with DirectX instead of OpenGL, etc, etc, etc, were done by people who went in front of Bill Gates and told him that he's wrong.
And there were enough cases where they switched directions in mid-flight, instead of ploughing ahead to the hilt. E.g., they weren't going to do any Internet support, they wanted to make their own proprietary network. Some ex-Borland guy went to Bill and told him that it's a mistake, and the rest is history.
Heck, from the very beginning there's the story of the new guy who went to Bill Gates to tell him that the flood-fill function in MS Basic is crap and needs to be rewritten. So he got asked to write a better one then. Turns out that that function was written by Bill himself.
Now the PR bullshit they spew on the outside world, is a whole different story. And the kind of PR stunt in TFA _is_ probably their work. Though even that one occasionally admits that an older product had bad parts. E.g., see the Clippy spiel when they finally got rid of that annoyance.
Or you'll notice that there are more dumb ideas than that, which got silently discontinued. E.g., MS Bob. Now that was a fuckup. I don't see them still pushing it instead of admitting that it didn't work.
Now mind you, I'm not saying that MS is anywhere near perfect or ideal in any form or shape or aspect. But they do realize that sometimes things don't work as formerly planned, and some are just mistakes. You don't get to be a mega-corporation that size by being keeping doing a mistake just to not admit it.
But again, admitting it to the outside world, now that's a whole other problem. Of course they're not going to say Vista is crap, as long as they don't have a replacement. But they _are_ already working on Windows 7 and on the SP1 for Vista, and I'd be surprised if they didn't include some of the lessons learned in the design of both.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This campaign has two problems:
1. It wrecks the illusion that Microsoft believes "Vista is the most successful Windows release ever". Have you seen them talk about Vista in public? They cite sales statistics and call it their most well received release ever. Why then do that campaign in the first place, and that late into the cycle?
2. Microsoft underestimated the power of technical users forming the opinion of their less technical friends, clients, family. The marketing of Vista (the "wow" begins now and so on) was targeted to the non-technical folks, while ignoring to address the concerns raised by the more technical people they communicate with on a daily basis. This campaign fails in that as well, so it'll have a very minimal effect on Vista's PR.
Shouldn't you be fellating Bill right now, Mr. Ballmer?
FWIW, built in webcams on most new notebooks work out of the box with no drivers (for which I'm thankful).
Andy
Having to use the OS *every day* is way different than a 10 minute demo.
Andy
PC: (Same ol' PC, but with dark glasses and fake beard and moustache) And I'm a Mojave.
Crowd of people gather around PC: Ooooooh! Ahhhhhh!
PC's fake beard drops off. People quietly stare at PC for a moment, then wander away--muttering.
Apple logo.
You can significantly reduce the amount of memory that Vista uses by tweaking the startup services. I stumbled across an excellent site that has a table of all the default Vista services and what they do, with a categorized breakdown of what you should and should not disable.
Why only ten minutes? Did they BSOD after that time?
***it would be a bit of a reach to expect that the test methodologies were real-world enough such that users had to deal with things like user account control, driver updates, and broad application compatibility."***
If they made it easier for a normal user to turn off UAC....would be better.
Driver updates - meh - I have 3 systems, all different, running vista....and the ONLY thing I had that I needed a specific driver for was my aBit system board because of the uGuru chip on it...
Broad application compatability? Get rid of your shitty software from the 90s.
Is the OP saying that Apple's mantra of "it just works" (which I think we all know "it just doesn't")
And let's not even go down the road of Linux....Driver problems? Check! Application Compatability Problems? Check! Limited user security is about the best thing about Linux ;P Til a newbie user has to SU to do something...or heck, they just login as root anyways because they don't know better....
I am one of those who falls into the "die hard XP" group.
I DID try Vista. I gave it a fair dinkum go, and here's my story. I even sang it's praises for a short time (up until about point 4, which was less than 1 month in)
- Bought Vista, and an extra 1GB of memory, as I knew I'd need it.
- Installed Vista, installation and activation went smoothly.
- Had pain with sound card drivers (Creative SB Audigy 2). Couldn't change between headphones / speakers without relaunching every application that played sound. Very annoying.
- World of Warcraft (and other games) could not be run in Window mode without huge performance penalties. Found could alt-tab out of full screen with little of the normal delay you get when alt-tabbing out
- Discovered leaving a full screen 3D app alt-tabbed for more than a few minutes resulted in that app being inaccessible, requiring process kill.
- Decided to upgrade video card to get a performance boost. Vista required activation because I changed video cards. Couldn't be activated over the net, had to call Microsoft directly during business hours to get it turned back on. Ended up having to call from work and use remote desktop to enter the code supplied. WTF?
- A few days later, decided to get a second identical video card to get better performance (yay SLI!) No activation needed this time thankfully.
- Discovered Vista wouldn't run my video cards in SLI mode. Discovered BIOS update to fix this... installed it.
- Discovered despite the fix, Vista still wasn't running anything in SLI mode.
- Installed Ubuntu to dual-boot into. Discovered Ubuntu would quite happily run my video cards in SLI mode.
- Spent several nights googling, and testing things to get SLI working
- Formatted, re-installed Windows XP... no problems since.
Those are not the problem.
Dealerships sell lemons all the time by only showing the customer the paint job. I have one machine that has had no issues after I got Vista setup and the correct drivers. A second one that while it met the recommended specs of Vista, still runs much better and faster now that I have XP back on it.
As a consumer, I still have not seen many features in Vista that make me want it over XP. The only reason I can think of is if you go 64 bit.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
You say 75% of the whiners haven't ever installed it and the other 25% tried it on a 6 year old budget computer.
The questions I have are
1) Where did you get your stats?
2) If so many people are complaining and the stats that I have seen here on slashdot and elsewhere show people
are avoiding Vista like a case of syphilis, then don't you think applying Occam's razor would suggest that,
you know, maybe, just maybe, THAT VISTA SUCKS SO MUCH THAT PEOPLE ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT IT AND SUING FOR
FALSE ADVERTISING OF VISTA READY HARDWARE?
3) Can you give the rest of us some good data and logic demonstrating that Occam's razor is wrong on this one?
These users never had to install software or drivers, never had to do any configuration, and were certainly never allowed to use any software that didn't work flawlessly with Vista (almost everything).
Vista's appeal is that it looks nice on a computer in a store. It's only when you actually start using it for day-to-day computing that it shows its true colors.
I had the displeasure of using the business edition of Vista for 6 months on a major OEM computer that came with it pre-installed. Even during the first week my "Windows stability index" graph hovered near 3 out of 10. From day one I couldn't install any printers, couldn't install or uninstall Windows components, and experienced hourly crashes in everything from Firefox to Photoshop from ordinary, everyday use. I disabled Aero and reverted to the Windows Classic theme after the novelty wore off (a few days after I started using the machine), but that didn't stop Aero's dwm.exe from continuing to devour memory and CPU time. Everything crashed, over and over and over again. Vista sets a new record for lowest average uptime, even for a Microsoft OS. It wasn't until I made the mistake of trying to install Microsoft Virtual PC on Microsoft Windows Vista that it deleted all the NTFS permissions on my entire system drive, breaking everything. I nuked the drive and installed XP, and have been happily using it for months.
Keep in mind that this is a machine from a major OEM that came preloaded with signed Vista drivers. I can only imagine what my experience would have been had I installed Vista on an older machine without the proper hardware and drivers.
While playing with Vista for a few days (as the users in this blind test did) can be an enjoyable experience, actually using it for day-to-day computing is an utter nightmare.
Vista was pretty, had nice eye candy much like the Mac and Gnome had at the turn of the century, but I really, really need an OS that can run without the old BSOD.
I tried Vista for a month. Worked fine at first (although the admin crap, good idea it may be, was way, way to slow to be ready for commercial release), but within a month of using it, it would give me the old BSOD every time I would try and get my mail online. Not all that useful.
Mac & Gnome offer similar eye candy, and with a much more stable platform.
2000 and XP were pretty close to stable - as close as MS ever got. I think they need to keep working in that direction - make the OS function FIRST, before adding eye candy.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
I generally like Vista. Its flawed though and i hope that Microsoft will fix the silly memory management which just gobbles of all of your ram and never releases it to applications (they say it does... but it does not)
Going back to XP... is a bit primitive feeling. Vista has some nice UI enhancements, but i would rather see Microsoft do more with it. Its anoying to always switch folders to detail list mode, and some just show the music details... this is very anoying.
Even if you switch a folder to show a detail list... It would be nice for Vista to auto adjust each information column to display the information properly. I know you can right click on it, and have it adjust... but you need to do this for every folder.
XP is too barebones, and Vista is too bloated.
But i do like vista... i dont love it... and often i hate it.... but i tend to like it.
The DRM shit has to go, and they need to focus on system performance and ui rather than worry about stupid shit like weather or not i can steel movies or music from their data pathways. Especially when its at the cost of performance. Any smart computer user would know that performance is very important. Microsoft needs to get that in their head. The OS is not an interface to giant corporations, it is my desktop.
I know MS says in order to get blu-ray on windows, they had to encrypt the video pathways, thus rendering millions of crt monitors, landfill material. I find this disgusting, especially from BILL GATES, who is supposedly a humanitarian with an interest in helping man and the environment. Well Bill, you just dumped a shitload of CRT's into the ocean.
Blu-ray would have come to windows no matter what. The entire world runs windows... i think Sony would have to live with that.
Rip the DRM shit out now. Its bad for the environment, the user, and the performance of your OS. When you're more concerned with protecting IP, than PC performance, you are no longer writing an OS in my opinion.
I did say i enjoyed vista right? hehe.. I do... its got to evolve into a lighter, leaner, faster, meaner os. MS needs to make a killer OS. Vista was not it, but perhaps a step towards it. We can only hope.
Firstly it's Microsoft selecting people, like they select people on their getthefacts site.
Secondly, asking people if they like an operating system... it's not like most people are going to be dicks and say "it sucks" to someone's face. If I was there I'd probably be encouraging and tell them I liked it too, doesn't mean I wouldn't switch from Ubuntu though.
How could anyone NOT know what Vista looks like (and acts) at this point? Why do I picture 99 out of 100 of the users in these videos sitting down at the machine and saying "This sure as hell looks like Vista" and then getting frustrated and leaving.
and the other 25% tried to put it on a 6 year old budget "Dude I got Dell" computer the first month after it went public.
What operating system do you recommend putting on a PC from 2002? Is there anything better than Puppy Linux for such hardware?
Folks, this is advertising. They have a really good ad agency now.
To some extent the damage is done, the Vista 'anticlimax' is somewhat entrenched in people's perceptions. But again they have a good ad agency now and they are going to use all the tools.
Very clever piece of PR on Microsoft's part. Nobody said ever said they weren't great at PR.
Speaking of blind taste tests, a funny thing happened a long time ago... my son was about six years old, we were at a mall where they were inviting people to "take the Pepsi challenge." My son was all excited, and so we lined up. They put two plastic cups in front of him. He tasted both. They asked which one he liked better.
"I like this one better," he said with a great air of seriousness, but, unfortunately for Pepsi, he went on solemnly, "because it's colder and it has more bubbles in it." The presenters tried to bull ahead ("You chose Pepsi!") but it was too late... everyone within earshot was cracking up.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Maybe not when they initially buy a machine... but Microsoft has trained people well that after about 6 months of using Windows and installing all sorts of software, sometimes the best solution various random problems and performance issues is a TOTAL OS REINSTALL... or to buy a new computer.
Its nothing more then the Burger King Ads that Say "Real Customer" Yeah? They are real customers. Real customers that then just happen to be Actors they have hired for the spots. totally legal to call them that. I am guessing this is the same BS. If I work for BMW and I buy a BMW then am in a Commercial about how I bought a BMW because I love them so much and think they are the best cars. Opps its an ad I don't have to tell you I just happen to be the Head of Marketing for BMW. Plus all the other BS people have mentioned. Like totally controlled and what 20 min of surfing the web? EEEWWWW PREETTTTY SHIINNNYYY
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Dude 1998 called and they want their memory back.
No offense but you don't represent the target market and you might want to take a stroll down FRY's aisles to get caught up on 1GB $20 RAM, just don't buy a couple happy meals and you can upgrade.
The low-end market will catchup.
Why?
Because hardware gets dirt cheap after a year or two.
The most obvious sign they are bad at PR? Everyone knows it is PR. PR is like secret agencies, if you know about it, it ain't very secret/good.
MS used plenty of PR to launch Vista and it didn't work. Linux keeps being a threat on the server and Apple sells a LOT of machines and only seems to be selling more and more.
Pepsi ain't Vista. There is very little reason to choose one soft drink over the other except taste. Nobody, not even the soft drinks companies themselves, would dare to claim there is a quality difference. Pepsi challenge doesn't try to suggest that Coca-Cola is unhygenic or causes disease or ruins the economy. It is ALL about PR and so the Pepsi challenge makes sense.
But Vista shouldn't be about taste, you should choose an OS for ease of use, quality, stability and flexibility. this ain't things you sell with pure PR, these are things you sell with facts.
And it is here that MS clearly fails with its PR. I recently installed Vista on my game machine for Age of Conan (dud OS for a dud game) and to be honest, I do notice that it has far less freezes with Aero then under xp. With freezes I mean that the desktop keeps redrawing even under load, something that often didn't happen under previous Windows versions. Sure, it ain't linux (my desktop OS) but it is better. But did MS promote Aero for its better response time under load? No, they focus on the look. Whoo! Because when I run a game full screen or a browser full screen I care about a transparent border that is then hidden.
PR should only be used subtly and to boost solid points and to closs over weaknesses but when an entire launch is all PR and everyone knows it you done it very bad indeed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
XP won't even run well on 256MB of RAM.
Actually those were the Pepsi taste tests. The difference is important, because Pepsi is sweeter than Coke Classic.
Turns out that in blind taste tests, people almost always choose the sweeter thing over the less sweet thing. Since Pepsi is sweeter than Coke Classic, the majority of people would choose Pepsi. (You can further stack the deck by giving them the Coke option first. That allows the remaining sugar in their mouth from the Coke sweeten the Pepsi even further.)
Similar thing happens with UIs and by extension this Vista test. The prettier thing always wins if you don't allow enough time to really learn the application.
Vista is prettier than XP, so it will always win a "taste test" style test because no one gets long enough to discover that beneath all that flash there's a slower, less stable, more annoying OS.
Just like the fact that even though Pepsi always "wins" in taste tests, Coke still beats it in the market.
Nobody ever disagreed with that!
I'm aware that this is a nigh-useless comment, but I had to express my joy (and to a lesser extent, concern) that this was modded "Redundant", and not "Troll" or "Flamebait".
We tried selling them Vista... We tried threatening the VARs and manufacturers... We tried threatening XP users... Now we're gonna fool 'em into buying our operating system!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And I still get weird flashbacks of me crawling naked through the desert with a tribe chief on my back.
My experience installing it over Windows XP on a Hewlett Packard notebook was exactly the same as buying it installed on a Dell notebook — within a month, both OS's went south and crashed hard. So hard, in fact, that reinstalling Vista was impossible on the Dell, since the machine could not boot at all, could not get past IPL, even though boot diagnostics reported the hardware in perfect working order.
I threw away the HP as the bloated piece of crap it was, and installed Ubuntu 8.04 on the Dell. Hardy Heron has problems too, of course — about like the old OS 8 or 9 Macintosh — nothing, in other words, that I can't deal with or work around using Simple Backup Config/Restore.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Except that I stopped after installing Ubuntu. Suddenly, my laptop with a "mere" 512MB of RAM is responsive again.
Oh, and I don't have to worry about viruses, either.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Vista 64 runs damn fast on my system.
ThinkPad T61
Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz
4GB DDR2
Hitachi 7k200 disk
NV Quadro NVS 140m
This is a standard, run of the mill business notebook. It has 4GB of memory, but memory is really, really dirt cheap now. It ran fine before I upgraded it to 4GB, too.
I dig your enthusiasm, but shelleytherepublican.com is a mostly-clever work of irony (I hope). Check out this Hardy Heron review. Har.
GP was having some fun at GGP's expense.
Because the current 'dumb' was not enough for MS.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
They threw on a new interface skin and ran it in a near-kiosk mode to keep users from wandering "too far" into the system to find a fault with it? That's really saying something when you're product is so bad that you have to trick people into using it under the pretense that it's an entirely new product.
If only it was just about the money... we'd probably have legitimate sub-$100 copies of XP readily available to anyone wanting to buy one. But no, it's now a war over who can control the most information, and the older OSes lack the means to do this properly.
8==8 Bones 8==8
The site is apparently running Apache on CentOS.
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:34:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
Last-Modified: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:45:18 GMT
Etag: "27b8494-3e9-16f2b780"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1001
Content-Type: text/html
Netcraft claims that mojaveexperiment.com is running on Linux and Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS). If you generate a 403 error, and look at the HTML, you see this:
- Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new
- "feature" to Internet Explorer. If the text of
- an error's message is "too small", specifically
- less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns
- its own error message. You can turn that off,
- but it's pretty tricky to find switch called
- "smart error messages". That means, of course,
- that short error messages are censored by default.
- IIS always returns error messages that are long
- enough to make Internet Explorer happy. The
- workaround is pretty simple: pad the error
- message with a big comment like this to push it
- over the five hundred and twelve bytes minimum.
- Of course, that's exactly what you're reading
- right now.
This blog post includes a message that is remarkably similar, but different enough to be reworded for some reason. The wording of the message alone indicates that this is not served by IIS.
There's a key difference. Apple's strategy (for better or for worse) in selling Macs has been for over twenty years to sell new hardware. Microsoft's business plan has long been in a constant stream of cash from upgrades. I think there are probably flaws in Apple's Mac plan, but it's considerably different than how Microsoft functions. Vista, for Microsoft, represents a major failure.
No There is no difference. Percentage of userbase going out and buying leopard and those going out and buying vista are exactly the same. Both Apple and Microsoft rely mainly on new computers sold and enterprise contracts (Except for apple. I yet have to be pointed out to any shop using atleast 1000 apple desktops in an enterprisey environment for N number of years. Please Correct me if I'm wrong)
Microsoft isn't into developing and supporting mature operating systems, but into pushing new ones, even where users may not need them.
Oh. My. Fucking. God. This has to be the most retarded statement ever. Microsoft provides support to corporates on an unprecedented level. They even do custom fixes for their premier customers. You have no clue what you're talking about.
Microsoft isn't into developing and supporting mature operating systems, but into pushing new ones, even where users may not need them.
They support Operating systems for 12-14 years. Which is the magical OS from Apple that has had support for so long? Oh thats right. There isn't one. They just change hardware and stop supporting API's when its convenient to them. AFAIK Windows has the best compatibility record of any OS till date - 27 years.
People who bought computers in 2005 or 2006 simply aren't interested in the upgrades, or in some cases the replacing of computers. These are still pretty powerful computers that can play games, calculate large spreadsheets and play DVDs and Flash. How do you tell someone who just spent $1500 on a computer two years ago that they need to spend two or three hundred bucks on an upgrade?
You dont get it do you? You think microsoft generated $60 billion in revenue in FY 2008 by hiring idiots? They know exactly what they're doing. You might have the illusion that they are faltering, but all evidence (to people who open their eyes) is to the contrary.
Microsoft has been forced into a corner and has to sell downgrade rights so that even when equipment needs replacing, XP ends up on the machine.
No they haven't. They realized that its easier to do this to shut up the vocal minority than anything else.
More announcements of hardware vendors making their product lines more open source friendly makes me think there's a fundamental shift in the industry underway
Open source friendly? Drivers for linux? Ha !
Microsoft isn't investing $500,000,000 in a disinformation campaign because there's no trend. There's a trend and they want to turn it.
You nailed that one. There's also partner apathy, application and infrastructure architecture incompatibilities, and the utter lack of compelling features to make the effort worthwhile.
IBM's error was partnering with Microsoft. Microsoft "knifed the baby." Everybody knows now that partnering with Microsoft is not the way to achieve dominance in the market because they always knife the baby.
It seems you've attracted the anonymous coward defenders of Redmond. You're getting painfully close to the truth.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I tried to type "information". :-) Baby on lap. You know how it is.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Some people consider me a fairly credible source. It is odd that you had factual issues with "disinformation" and not with "they always knife the baby." Nor with "the utter lack of compelling features." Perhaps you know better than to ask for citations there?
Interesting... if you change the url to http://ftp.mojaveexperiment.com/ it redirects one to http://bamideas.com/ which appears to be a marketing firm in New York and Microsoft is listed as one of their major clients.
out of band. Otherwise they'll catch on to us. Use email instead.
Use the chat channels or log your guidance against the posting credit ticket.
And stay away from the OP. He's compulsive about rebuttals, posts links that reverse your message and he's always favorably moderated. Avoid.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Tiger Direct dot com...
You're welcome. =)
Well, many people complain about the shine and glitter. Apparently, it can be turned off.
Other people complain about speed. Yes, it's lousy. Yes, a modern PC can handle it, but you do you want to loose performance? However, fast enough PCs, well, shrug... good enough for most things, who cares if you get only 70 FPS instead of 95.
My main reason for not using Vista is simple: they fell for the [RI|MP]AA babbel, and modified their system accordingly. Every internal data transfer is encrypted, in the moronic hope that this'll stop Jow Average from copying DVDs and the like. HD -> en/decrypt -> CPU -> en/decrypt -> GPU.
This eats performance. This is not what an OS should be doing. This treats me like a thief. This pisses me off.
Simple.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
When you start a campaign about how great your current OS offering is, make sure it runs some sort of your offerings.
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.mojaveexperiment.com
72.47.200.149 Linux Apache/2.2.3 CentOS 27-Jul-2008
Microsoft is at fault for claiming the Vista would "run" on 512M RAM on a crap machine.
HP, of course, is well-known for its own crapware.
Frankly, that's the good thing about Apple, IMHO. Not only is OSX better than Windows in several respects, but Apple totally kicks the butts of HP/Dell/Gateway (though you do pay for such quality).
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Whatever about the content, the site mojaveexperiment.com is served by Apache/Centos:
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:52:58 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
Last-Modified: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:45:37 GMT
Etag: "27b85b4-c58-7981240"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 3160
Content-Type: text/html
200 OK
The effort seems to be fully under way by now. There's even a link to a "Facts"-section called "What you may not know." pointing here: http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/facts
Oops:
###
Server Error
404 - File or directory not found.
The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
###
Apparently no facts were involved in the experiment...